With the exception of Mike Acton, all the speakers from HandmadeCon 2015 will be coming back for HandmadeCon 2016. Part of the goal for this is to provide a forum for all the audience questions that we didn't have time in the schedule for last year.

So, please post your questions for Jonathan Blow, Patrick Wyatt, Ron Gilbert, and Tommy Refenes in this thread, so I can collect and curate them prior to the conference.

If you would like your question attributed to you if I select it as one of the ones to ask, please include your home city and how to correctly pronounce your name.

for tommy refenes:
you tweeted about imposter syndrome, specifically in relation to handmade con 2015. can you talk a little bit about it? and if and how it influences your day to day work and feelings?

My name is Eden Segal, E'-de'n Se'gal, from Afula, Israel. if you would like to say my name, please also use my handmade network handle The_8th_mage.

Question for Jonathan Blow ,
The development period of Witness project is much longer than Braid.How did you come through the demotivation and self –doubt part ? Is there a general method for everybody ?
Ask Jon ,Is there any possibility that he gives us a talk on Braid’s rewind implementation in detail like he did on JAI(not the series, a hour length or more , I mean).I have watched his talk about the rewind on GDC(30 mins) and something on Youtube, I want to know more in details. PS. I am not sure whether the second topic is suitable for HC, because It will need a lot of time for Jonathan to prepare , and maybe he has lost the interest , he doesn’t want to give the same topic again.

Question for Patrick Watt,
1. Are there any differences between debugging a non-net (non-net ?)game and a MMORPG game ? Are there any silver bullets for debugging MMORPG game ? In which part you spend the most of your development time ?After so many years of development ,you still have to give that part a very serious study and research.

2. For data analysis , such as DAU, ARPU etc etc. do you have a separate system for the game manager or operation department to access ?Did the data directly come from reading the database ? My former company , the access of data base will affect the player ,so we have to wait when the players are sleep , then we read the daily report about how much money the players spent etc.There is a huge disadvantage. If my second question is not about programming , you can ignore it.

Thanks in advance.

My name is Panfeng Zhang ,from Shenzhen , China. If you would like to say my name, please use my handmade network handle boleban. Don’t worry about things like correctly pronouncing my name.Because I don’t care things like that :)

What are the costs/benefits of shipping a mod api or level editor with a game?
The Powers That Be announce that the the next wave of PCs, game consoles, and mobile devices will now come with FPGAs. How do you use them?

For Tommy Refenes and John Blow:
Both Braid and Super Meat Boy were extremely successful games. I'm wondering if there are any parts of the game that you weren't quite happy with, that you would've like to have more time to spend on? Or is everything exactly the way that you wanted it?

For Pat:
What types of tools do you believe are most valuable when developing and debugging network games? Either in a client/server or peer-to-peer architecture. Are the tools the same? Is there something that you couldn't live without?

For everyone:
How do you approach making and designing in-house tools? Do you devote time to designing workflows for them? What do you want from third-party tools, other than fundamental things like stability, speed, and functionality?

Alternative/additional question:
To anyone who has started or runs their own business, how does legal compliance (taxes, regulation, patents, permits, etc.) affect your day-to-day work, and projects overall? Have there been any problems you can talk about, or any gotcha's you've run into?

William (like the Conqueror)
Bundy (like the serial killer or the family from Married With Children)
from Redlands, California.

Parents of young organic life forms are warned that towels can be harmful, if swallowed in large quantities.

Q (to anyone pertinent): When creating an engine or shipping a game, what do you look for in a file format for asset data? How do you balance compression vs speed vs readability? What is the best file format you've worked with, and why? Do consoles need any special considerations in this regard?

Q for Jonathan: When making The Witness, what was the most difficult or unexpected programming task you faced? In the seven years you spent making the game, what do you think you learned, from a programming perspective?

Btw, if you want to gather questions live during con, then I can recommend https://www.sli.do/ This was used in a few sessions in LLVM dev conference. Audience basically submitted questions during few panels and everybody voted for them. Towards the end the top most voted questions were discussed.

It was super easy to use - anybody in audience could anonymously go to their page, enter conference code and write/vote. No registration was needed to ask a question.

If you could go back in time and give yourself only one piece of advice at the beginning of your career, what would it be?

For Jon,

In your talk "How to Design Deep Games" you spoke about the importance of there being real love in an idea before embarking on a long project. You mention iterating on the question "what do I care about?" as a means of getting there.

What was this process like for you before embarking on Braid and subsequently The Witness?